![]() ![]() Some go through the night, and Awa men and women take to the forest with resin torches or electric lanterns. The Awá also keep monkeys temporarily as pets, and will refrain from shooting one in the wild if they recognize it.Īwá hunts are long, lasting up to seven or eight hours at a stretch. Hunters use barbed tips for hunting monkeys, a major source of protein, so that the intelligent creatures don’t simply pull the arrows out. Good arrows are trusted and protected, and thrown away only if they become defective or strike and kill a human. Arrows are made from bamboo, wood, and resin, and some are fletched with hawk feathers. The weapon of choice for Awá hunters (as for karawara) is the bow and arrow. Karawara prowl the same forests as the Awá, but move so swiftly that humans never see them. One of the world’s last hunter-gatherer tribes, the Awá believe that when they die they’ll become karawara, sky-dwelling beings that descend to earth in search of deer and honey. Hunting-that is, walking-in the forest is what these indigenous Amazonians (which are thought to number around 350) spend much of their lives doing. It’s fitting that the Awá have such a simple and capacious term for the act of hunting. Watá pyry means “to walk together,” whether the walkers are a team of hunters or a pair of young lovers. When they say they’re going out to hunt, people in the Awá tribe use the word watá, which translates roughly as “to walk.” Watá kaa means both “to go hunting in the forest” and “to go walking in the forest.” Watá can also be translated, “to search for food.” It can describe a deer eating ripe fruit off a tree, a gang of beetles tearing through bags of stored grain, or men pursuing a puma with bow and arrow.
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